The Right Finds Its New Attack on Obama

Greg Sargent flags the lead paragraph of the lead story from the Politico this afternoon.

In a nearly 6,000-word address Thursday extending an olive branch to the Muslim world, President Barack Obama managed never to utter the one word that comes to mind most often when many Americans think about Islam: terrorism.

Greg's response was spot-on: "Now, there may well be a poll somewhere finding that the word most associated with Islam is 'terrorism.' Even so, it's an awfully weird news judgment to lead with a formulation this crass on a day as historic as this one." (Update: Andrew Perez has a good item along these lines: "Is 'terrorism' really the word that comes to mind when Americans hear 'Islam'? If that's true, we can point the blame at a media which never drew the distinction between adherents of Islam and religious extremists. Gerstein's article doesn’t do much to fix this perception."

And speaking of crass new judgment, Fox News' Megyn Kelly and Bill Sammon, two of the network's more embarrassing partisans, went after the same point. Kelly asked her boss, "Not one mention of terror, the war on terror, or terrorism. What do you make of it?" He responded, "Well, I make of it that he has taken us off a war footing as a nation, and it's now clear. When you give a six-thousand-plus word speech to the Muslim world and you don't mention terror, terrorist, or terrorism, that's not an accident."

It's sad, in a way. I watched the speech this morning, scrutinizing the content, and recognizing the event as a possible turning point for U.S. relations with Middle East. It was only one speech, but it was an address that has the potential to shape the future in real and important ways. It just never occurred to me that conservatives, within a few hours of the historic speech, would go after the president, while he's still on foreign soil, for not reaching out to Muslims around the world through use of the "t" word.

Not that it matters, but the president referenced the attacks of 9/11 (three times), "violent extremists" (four times), "violent extremism" (twice), and "al Qaeda" (three times). He also expressed a sentiment that would presumably find favor among his Republican detractors: